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Mao Was a False God for the French

Updated July 22, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

David Gress's review of "The Wind From the East" by Richard Wolin (Books, July 17) does not attack strongly enough the author's viewpoint that the 1960s French Maoism of intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault should not be taken literally because the politics they were arguing under that name were actually liberal rather than the totalitarian values with which Maoism eventually became identified. Nothing can be further from the truth.